Time well wasted

Posted April 25th 2011 07:14 pm

Not to knock off Brad Paisley's album, but today was really wasted. With the building's main internet connection going inactive at 11:15 (just as I finished the first draft of this entry, along with getting ready to begin today's work), and just came back at 6pm (as of this writing) - you'll understand more at the end of the post. This means that I couldn't do anything that I wanted to do today that required the Internet (and nowadays, what doesn't?). While the Internet was out, I did get a budget created for the wedding, and also created a master copy of the guest list that Keat and I will be maintaining. Aside from that, it has been a very wasted day. Stupid internet. ANYWAY.....

I've made some improvements to the blog recently; mainly SEO-friendly URL's. It did require a re-parsing of the feed, but hey, at least the relevant URL's are showing in search results instead of "entry.php?id=48". I think that counts for something.

Last week was certainly a week for attacks, wasn't it? I mean, with our DoS attack on 4/20, then Amazon's AWS network going down (which supplies about 90% of the important stuff on the internet), and Sony's Playstation Network going down, and not to mention the launching of Skynet (for those of you who pay attention to The Sarah Connor Chronicles, although the same thing could be said about April 29, 2010, if you know what I mean), things certainly had a downward spiral last week. On a semi-related note, I just created a CRON job that will scan our secure SSH log, filter out denied access attempts, add the offending IP addresses to our firewall, and email me the report. Not bad for a 15 minute "lets-do-it-now-and-it-hopefully-works" job.

On the up-side, I have made some major improvements to the Shadow Dev mobile site along with the CloudFlare service. It was a bit confusing trying to get the mobile site to update with the CloudFlare proxy DNS set in, but I finally got through it.

On the flip side, the apartment looks like a tornado went through it. Everything that had its own little storage area is now in the middle of the living room, dining room, and part of the kitchen. Why? Because we are moving to Waynesville and we have to get everything packed. Although our original plan was to move at the end of June/July, a friend of ours let us in on a connection to some local landlords and they are looking to have the smallest downtime ever, so with the eviction of their old tenant last friday, they want someone to move in NOW! So we had to move up our move-out date to the end of May (must give current landlords a min. of 30 days notice, as usual). It's not that we don't like Bear Creek, but with Keat going to WCU and the business in Waynesville, the amount of gas alone would be at least $100 a week if we stayed in Asheville. Also, we haven't spent enough time in Asheville to really call it "home" - sure, it's nice and trendy, but we spend more time in Waynesville than in Asheville (really, there are over 200 events, restaurants, shops, and more in Asheville, and we've been to.....4?).

Anyway, I've also picked up the PS2 again and started playing some of my games (the ones that weren't packed yet). I started Onimusha 2 again, and it was pretty fun. I was beating myself up for remembering certain things in certain levels, then trying to figure out how to get them (like the Yellow door at Gifu castle) when in the end, Jubei goes back to those locations and can access them. I beat that in about 4 days (mainly playing between 11pm and 4am). After the boss battle, I switched to Onimusha 3, which (thank god) finally allows access of the left analog stick. I was getting tired of using the D-pad for directional control. I also had my previous save file on my memory card, so I could use Samanosuke's Cowboy outfit (not really appealing, but I thought I'd give it a try). 2 days in, and I'm already at the Zoo level.

On to today's to-do list: working on NSMT's Shuttle system and mobile site, working on finishing Lu's Specialties Foods design, getting Innocent Footprints design planned out (code-wise), finishing Shadow Dev's mobile site, take some business calls for insurance and a potential client, service a friend's computer, create site analysis for competition, write some articles, and see about getting the Wedding site up and going with the online RSVP system. Yay for Monday....

And Monday continues to taunt me with the absence of an internet connection from 11:15 to ??? (although, the college that our building connects through is also down, which means their internet connections, VoIP Phones, teleconference systems, faxes, etc, are all down as well - what luck....). I finish my weekend reader, create a small cron job, reply to some emails, (and write this entry), and as soon as I'm ready to begin my actual work....the internet goes down.

On the up-side (again), I did receive a CloudFlare T-shirt in the mail today (it must have been delievered on Saturday since Friday was a holiday). Thanks CloudFlare, and keep up the goodgreat work!